1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to computer programs and in particular to software for creating a customized web page containing information from other web pages accessible by a client computer from an inter- or intra-net.
2. Description of Related Art
Web pages are typically made up of HyperText Markup Language (HTML) tags displaying HTML source files containing the headings, data, text, footings and hyperlinks to other web pages. In many instances, the user at a client computer desires to see only a small portion of the total web page, Many web pages span several screens which require the user to move up and down in order to view all of the desired information. This becomes tedious and counterproductive when the web page on which the desired information is consulted often. The prior art provides no method of providing individual customization to include only the subset of data that a particular user finds of interest and still retain the basic structure of the web page from the original document.
Existing web search engines usually search data from many sources and not a single web document. Since they search for data from many sources, there is no single web page with a basic structure to preserve. Search engines such as Yahoo and Alta Vista, available on the Internet and intra-net applications currently are not useful for customizing a particular web page by retaining the basic structure of the web page and presenting a subset of the data in the page. All that such search engines do is to present rows of lines that have the requested search items.
Moreover, such web pages containing desired information may change on a periodic basis, so that any information copied from such pages quickly becomes outdated. The prior art does not provide the ability of a user to easily build a customized web page from a series of unrelated web pages and to have the customized web page updated with changes as changes take place in the series of original web pages. There is a further need to have the changes to the web pages addresses (URLs) automatically be included in the customized web page if the changes occur anywhere in the series of web pages to data used in a customized web page.
Bearing in mind the problems and deficiencies of the prior art, it is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a process and system for creating a customized web page from other web pages accessible by a client computer from an inter- or intra-net.
It is another object of the present invention to provide to a user only a subset of data from a web page that a user desires, while still retaining the original structure of the web page from the original document.
Yet another object of the present invention is to provide a customized web page from one or more other web pages of documents which retains a header, footer and optionally other original structure from at least one of the web pages from the original documents.
A further object of the invention is to easily build a customized web page from a series of unrelated web pages, and to have the customized web page updated with changes as the changes take place in the original unrelated web pages.
Still other objects and advantages of the invention will in part be obvious and will in part be apparent from the specification.